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Finally.... it's organized

A project log for MCP3564-Breakout

A breakout board for Microchip's highly-flexible rail-to-rail ADC

j-ian-lindsayJ. Ian Lindsay 07/22/2021 at 07:470 Comments

This project's hardware aspect has been in my cruft pile for more than a year. I've finally eaten through the backlog. But I've been actively using the part since I originally rolled it, and the driver has been continuously improving since. Now that things are (mostly) stable with this board, I've listed it on Tindie and will be maintaining the driver.

Regarding code and support:

Trying to track comms across different projects (one for each breakout) is overwhelming, and questions might go unanswered. Please use this project's chat room for support going forward. The big topic will almost certainly be firmware. 

Getting my driver to work as-written is non-trivial at this point, but should be both possible, and easier in the future. If you are willing to suffer a little and use my support libraries, I'll support those as well.

My driver is almost entirely non-commital with respect to the use-cases. So it's complicated and probably difficult to understand. Other users of this chip might sensibly decide to use my driver as a baseline for their own (less generalized) drivers. The cost of this generality is partly paid at runtime, and that's a cost you might not want to pay if you are working inside a mint-tin.

The driver will probably never support the chip's addressing scheme (multiple chips accessed with a single bus transaction and CS pin). 

The supply chain sucks

It does. You know it. Almost every big project has a part that is out of stock or going EoL. Microchip itself hasn't run dry of parts, but SiliconLabs (who made the OSC on the version of the board that includes it), has. I will be sub'ing it out for an (almost) equivalent Microchip part. The new part has twice the drift, and 2mA more current draw. But at least I can still buy them. I will post updated datasheets and specs once I validate the new part. Until then, I am out-of-stock on the "with OSC" version of the board. 

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